I’m very excited about this forthcoming international conference organized by the Department of Ethnology – Stockholm University and CHAMP/Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy – University of Illinois to be held in Stockholm on the 10-11 September 2015. I really hope I can go as I have always wanted to visit Asplund’s cemetery!

The conference organisers are currently making a CfP:

Call for papers

Death. We all face it. It is the greatest of the life crises and since time immemorial all human societies have devised ways to cope with and explain death. Around the world death is being reconceptualized as heritage, replete with material markers and intangible performances. These heritages of death are personal, national, international and global. They are vernacular as well as official, sanctioned and alternative. The heritage of death has religious, political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic aspects as well. This conference explores the many dimensions of death as heritage.

The highlight of the conference (in addition to Stockholm itself) is a guided study tour of Skogskyrkogården, Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery, designed by Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz in 1914-1940, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.

CDAS is 10 this year and will be celebrating all the work that’s been achieved during the annual conference, which this year has the theme ‘Death and its Futures’. Meanwhile, for those of you who can never attend the free CDAS seminars, they are now available online as podcasts. Enjoy!

I also want to plug a fascinating and stimulating event that is happening through Manchester Metropolitan University called ‘Encountering Corpses‘

If any of you have ever read my academic work you’ll be familiar with me stressing the cultural significance of cremation in Britain and the huge social and cultural impact it had on British society over a century ago….if I were a futurist I’d be claiming that the Urban Death Project (UDP) is the next cultural ‘game changer’ in funerary rituals and our expectations of death and beyond in so-called ‘Western’urban societies. There’s a lot of similarity between the rhetoric used to promote ‘natural burial’ and the UDP, but they bare little resemblance to each other with regards to the place, space, materiality and temporality of grief, mourning and ensuing funerary rituals…what do you think? Is the UDP viable? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

This is the last of a 3-part radio series I have contributed to for CBC’s long running Ideas programme. Just when anthropologists like myself get exasperated that “the world is getting smaller and smaller” there’s nothing like a programme like this to remind us all that there is great diversity – such as in how death and dying are encountered today – even between seemingly similar English-speaking countries like Canada and Britain!

Burying the dead can be hazardous to our health. Every year, across North America, enough embalming fluid is used to fill a swimming pool, and enough metal to build another Golden Gate Bridge. Cremation can be toxic too, creating vapours from mercury fillings and hip implants. Against this backdrop, IDEAS producer Mary O’Connell concludes her three-part series with a look at the burgeoning green burial movement and its message of de-corporatizing death.

VANISHING ENTITIES gathers together and opens a Pandora’s Box of happenings focused on the big issue of life and death.

During the evening a series of audience participatory and interactive pieces will unfold, including a so-called death café: a group directed discussion of death. ‘VANISHING ENTITIES’ will also showcase films, performance lectures, live art events and scientific dance performances.

Death is inevitable: a journey into infinite mystery that adds a whole new existential dimension to life. It can be taken for granted, repressed or misunderstood, this blind departure point of the life force from the body.

But is physical death really the end of man?

Such an interrogation is like consulting an encyclopaedic or runic stone for definite answers only for other more complex questions to fly out! Narratives are constructed to begin & end, appear & disappear in an age-old cycle, bridging the chasm between birth and death.

Blending the creative projects of 17 specially invited artists, ‘VANISHING ENTITIES’ is part of this year’s London Science Festival.